We keep seeing how ALL ISSUES are INTER-CONNECTED.
Among the reasons why the U.S. has so much gun violence is that the U.S. government sets a bad example with our violent militaristic foreign policy.
On July 9 2016, I wrote about how President Obama was in Poland meeting with heads of NATO nations and expanding NATO provocatively to Russia’s borders and expanding NATO’s militarism into other part of the Eastern Hemisphere and pushing NATO’s member nations to spend more on militarism.
During his press conference there during that visit, Obama praised those military escalations and at the same time he also lamented gun violence in the U.S. He showed no recognition that these are interrelated.
The U.S. culture has increasingly accepted the erroneous assumption that violence solves problems. We see this in the U.S.’s foreign policy, in movies that end with shootouts (referred to as “the myth of redemptive violence”), and in people’s assumptions that guns provide self-defense (even though research shows that a gun in the home is much more likely to be used against oneself or a family member than against an intruder).
In order to reduce gun violence, we must explicitly challenge and undermine the cultural assumptions that promote violence, including “American Exceptionalism,” the notion that the U.S. is so special that we can disregard international law. We must DE-MILITARIZE U.S. foreign policy. We must base our foreign policy on nonviolence, human rights, and fairness to everyone worldwide.
